


Revision

by winterfold



Series: professional bias [2]
Category: Pod Save America (RPF)
Genre: Happy Ending, LA era, M/M, Pining while fucking
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-30
Updated: 2017-07-30
Packaged: 2018-12-08 17:07:07
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 12,670
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11650986
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/winterfold/pseuds/winterfold
Summary: The Jon Lovett story.





	Revision

**Author's Note:**

> This fic is mostly pod-compliant, not necessarily compliant with various social media accounts, and definitely not compliant with real life, please don't cross the streams, thank you.
> 
> Per Tradecraft, this is endgame Tommy/Lovett but contains a substantial amount of Lovett>Favs pining.

A month into his White House job, Jon promised himself that he wasn't gonna finish out the term. Speechwriter for Barack Obama was a good line on a resume, and there were people out there who wanted the job for better reasons, but he wasn’t one of them. It was a good gig: it paid the bills, but it didn’t make him excited to wake up in the morning; it didn’t make him feel like he knew where he was going.

So he was going to leave here before he turned thirty. He was going to go write in Hollywood and see if that felt right, in a way that law school applications or the math department at Williams hadn’t. And if that didn’t work out then, well, at least it was another possibility crossed off _What Are You Doing With Your Life, Jon Lovett?_ , and he could go on to the next thing.

He’d find something else. He always found something else.

He nearly didn’t.

 

**part i.**

Jon hooks up with Tommy in New Orleans and it’s mostly a mistake, fueled by mojitos and the bitter reality of being hung up on his straight boss turned best friend for the better part of a decade. Tommy keeps quiet except when he says, “Jon,” once, a small, ragged sound through his teeth. Jon swallows and wipes his mouth and lets himself wonder if this is what it was always like: dimly lit hotel rooms in cities they might not see again for months, years; the specter of bad decision-making thick in their throats, sitting uneasy along their shoulder blades.

Tommy’s polite enough when he presses Jon back against the edge of the bed and blows him in turn. It’s not the best blowjob Jon’s ever had, but that’s not the point of all this. When he’s done Tommy stays there for a minute, knees pressed into the carpeting and breathing hard through his mouth, and Jon lets him just long enough for the guilt to come crashing back.

The wedding’s next month. Jon should be over this. He should’ve been over it six months into his White House job, when Jon Favreau stopped being the person who looked at his last-minute writing sample and committed the unfathomable act of offering him a job, and instead became the person Jon had lunch with while they read over the latest poll numbers; when Jon found himself trying too hard to wring one last joke out of a fading conversation just to see if he’d laugh and learned that he would, every single time. 

Jon stayed three years in DC. He wrote speeches that didn't make a difference most of the time, argued with Favs just to watch him light up, head thrown back and throat quivering with laughter, and jerked off to the memory in the shower when he got home. It was fine. It was a situation he could deal with.

He told Favs he wanted to leave halfway through 2011, because Favs was what Jon thought of when he imagined staying through another year, another campaign, the coveted second term. It was one thing to fantasize about fucking Favs, another thing entirely to orient his whole life around him trying to live on the crumbs. Jon knew that, but he’d forgotten long enough to let himself get pulled into the orbit of Jon Favreau anyway.

He told Favs that he wanted to leave the same way he came out; he told Favs first so he couldn’t change his mind. He settled down in LA and let the distance do what he couldn’t himself, and he thought it’d worked until Favs quit working for the best boss he ever had and found himself a house across the street.

“Didn’t know you were a cuddler,” Jon tells Tommy now, who’s still got a hand laid on the inside of his thigh. “Or is that all Jon?”

Tommy jerks back from the vee of Jon’s legs, blinking. His eyelashes are very pale under the lamplight. “I,” he says. “I should go.”

“Right,” Jon says, watching him straighten up and brush off his knees. “Probably a good idea.”

Tommy leaves without looking back. Jon drops his head onto his pillow and feels the distance from now to the wedding like an oppressive, solid thing.

———

“Tommy and I still haven’t picked up our suits,” Jon says in the studio, and Favs laughs but he also says, “Guys!” in a tone that’s just starting to fray at the edges.

The wedding’s stressing Favs out, like it’s 2016 again and the guest list is the latest poll from Florida. Jon’s been poking at it, a bruise he’s not giving a chance to heal. The faint frantic turn around Favs’ mouth might not even be visible to someone who doesn’t know him; Jon hates it every time he sees it, hates that he can’t stop.

“Will you stop freaking out, it’s freaking _me_ out,” Jon says when they’re back at their desks. “I don’t even know what you’re worried about. Emily said yes, she’s not gonna like, take it back. And besides, it’s a wedding, people have been throwing those since time immemorial, what could—”

“Shut _up_ ,” Favs and Tommy yelp in unison.

“Remember the last time you said ‘what could possibly happen,’” Tommy says.

“Okay, so first of all, there was no _causation_ in that debacle, don’t be unscientific—”

“I don’t know what I’m worried about,” Favs admits. “I mean, I don’t know, the last year’s been pretty unreal, you know? Sometimes you scroll through Twitter and you’re like, all this shit can’t possibly be happening, it’s just too crazy—”

“—right, of course, Twitter, the seat of reality in the modern age—”

Favs laughs, suddenly sheepish. “I don’t want this to be like that,” he says. “This is— it’s a good thing I’ve got, I want it to feel— real, you know? Like I don’t wanna miss a moment of it, because all of it feels so right.”

And it’s not just that Favs looks happy; with his eyes fixed somewhere distant, Favs looks _awed_ , floored by the sheer magnitude of his good fortune. Jon tries to look away from the tender curve of his mouth, can’t quite manage it.

“Yeah, she’s marrying a speechwriter,” Jon says eventually. His grin feels like it might crack off his face, but it doesn’t really matter. “Put that in your vows, might even make Barack Obama cry.”

“Only fair,” Tommy says, too light. “He’s made all of us cry at one point or another.”

Tommy’s looking at Jon, when he finally tears his gaze away from the way Favs has gone radiant. There’s something tight in the set of his jaw.

Jon clears his throat. “Maybe you should start worrying about the really important things,” he hears himself telling Favs. “Listen, what if North Korea nukes LA next week? The suits are small fry, have some perspective.”

———

The Indochino showroom’s pretty close to Jon’s house, but with LA traffic it’s nearly a 45-minute drive. He ends up parked in front of Tommy’s place after they pick up the suits, a little tired, a knot of tightness somewhere between his shoulder blades. He should’ve made Tommy drive. Or they could’ve gone separately— no, but that wouldn’t have made sense. This was convenient. They’d both needed the same thing, anyway.

There’s still plenty of light outside, and Jon thinks about going back to his street. Taking the suit home to— hang it up, maybe. He might even see Favs on the way. Out on the street. Taking Leo for a walk.

He doesn’t stir. Tommy takes his suit from the backseat and then pauses, leaning down with his forearm braced against the passenger-side door frame.

“Listen,” he says, “you want like, a beer or something— or, maybe not, if you’re driving—”

“Sure.” Jon shrugs. Turns the ignition off and exhales. “Yeah, I’ll have something.”

Tommy leaves his suit draped over the back of his sofa when they get inside, then pulls two bottles out of his fridge and passes one over. Bud Light, not something with a pedigree. Jon takes a long pull, fingers wrapped around the cool glass, and swallows too fast; something sticks in his throat as it goes down. 

Tommy's got his back to the counter, taking slower, more deliberate sips. The way the shadows fall, Jon can’t exactly tell if Tommy is looking at him or the suit.

“You wanna—” Jon starts abruptly. Maybe they shouldn't. It's one thing to indulge in an impossibility in a city you’ll be leaving in six hours, but this is home. His. Tommy's.

Jon’s.

Tommy doesn't say anything for a long moment. Then he puts his drink down. The clink on the countertop, louder than it should be. Jon’s watching Tommy's fingers uncurl from their grip, one by one; the long line of Tommy’s legs as Tommy comes forward in measured steps.

He kisses Jon first, which comes as a surprise. “What, really,” Jon says without thinking, breaking off. “Making out in the kitchen, that's pretty old school, like, we’re seventeen and your parents are out—”

Tommy shoves a leg between Jon’s knees and goes back to kissing him.

There’s one hand cupped at the back of Jon’s head, the other pressed to the side of his neck. Jon moves, forgets he’s still holding his beer. Tommy fumbles down to Jon’s hand, taking the bottle from his grasp and stowing it somewhere, blindly. His hand comes back up: his fingertips slotted behind Jon’s ear, a thumb laid across his cheek.

Jon hadn’t thought it’d be like this. Tommy presses into him with a single-minded focus, like it’s the only thing he wants, and Jon lets himself stumble back until his shoulders hit the wall behind him. Tommy’s bent down to reach his mouth, Jon’s face tilted up; for a moment it’s like Tommy’s the only other person in the world.

Was Tommy like this on the campaign trail, Jon wonders hazily. _Could_ he have been, at all, or was this intensity something that came later, honed by the merciless DC eye— did he and Favs ever—

A shift, the slow drag of Tommy’s thigh against his crotch. Jon lets a sound slip from his throat, which might make Tommy smile; they’re close enough that Jon can feel the slow blink of Tommy’s eyelashes.

“Oh, fuck you,” Jon mumbles, and works a hand between them to undo Tommy’s fly.

Jon grinding up on Tommy’s leg; his hand inside Tommy’s boxers, wrapped around his dick. It’s not exactly sophisticated. It’s the kind of thing you’re supposed to outgrow on the nebulous path to adulthood, along with a slew of other things. Graphic tees ordered off Threadless. Takeout five times a week.

Being desperately in love with a friend who’s going to be married in three weeks is probably up there, too.

When Tommy comes, he’s still cradling Jon’s head with one hand. “Jon,” he gasps, “Jon, please,” breathless words that bleed together into more sound than meaning.

“Yeah, well,” Jon mutters, “that makes two of us, doesn’t it,” and what tips him over the edge might be the last jerk of his hips, the pressure against his dick and the inside of his thighs; might be Tommy’s thumb stroking slowly along the curve of his skull.

Jon’s not thinking about anything for a minute, eyes shut, trying to catch his breath. Then he barks out a laugh.

“What,” Tommy says. He’s let go of Jon by now but he’s still leaning in, one hand braced against the wall by Jon’s ear. Jon can just catch sight of the suit zipped up in its bag in his peripheral vision, a darker, blocky shape against the upholstery.

“It’s just—” Jon sighs. “A world full of guys out there, some of whom are even gay! And yet—” He sweeps up a hand, tries not to look too hard in the direction of the suit. “Just had to pick the one who’s in love with someone else.”

Tommy straightens a fraction. “Yeah,” he says, and his gaze slides away from Jon’s, flicks back up, jerky. “Right.”

Jon ducks out from beneath Tommy’s arm and grimaces at the tacky feeling in his shorts. “Okay, we gotta rethink this thing ‘cause like, this was fine _maybe_ freshman year of college, but I’m 34, I can’t pull off going commando— not that I could have ever, but the point stands. And now I gotta get back like this? Like, come on, I have _some_ dignity.”

He’s mostly talking for the sake of it, but Tommy starts guiltily at that. “Sorry.”

“Sure,” Jon says after a beat, when Tommy’s still staring at him. He’s pretty much in the same position, a little flushed, undone jeans caught somewhere mid-thigh, but hey, it’s his house. “You know the longer we just stand here the grosser it gets, right?”

He’s making for Tommy’s bathroom to deal with the worst of it when Tommy says from behind him, “You could crash here.”

“Wow,” Jon says, twisting around just to raise an eyebrow in Tommy’s direction, “pretty confident you can get it up again, huh.”

“Not—” Tommy lets out a brief laugh, runs a distracted hand through his hair. “For like an hour, I don’t know. I can run ‘em through the wash or something.”

“Can’t,” Jon says. “Gotta go let Pundit out, she’s probably already mad at me.”

“Oh,” Tommy says. “You’ve got— right, yeah.”

Jon doesn’t know if he’s missed a step in this conversation, or if it’s just something in the light. Tommy’s standing there, a thumb hooked through a belt loop in his jeans in a half-hearted attempt at pulling them back up over his hips, and he reminds Jon of one of those statues in museums: beautiful, austere, a little forlorn.

His eyes end up fixed at the opposite side where Tommy’s pants are still dipping low off the crest of his hip, the waistband of his boxers pushed down just far enough to show a sliver of skin. “Look,” he says, only half-aware of his words, “if you’re really desperate to do my laundry that’s fine, but then you gotta give me something to stave off indecency charges.”

He doesn’t know _what_ he expects Tommy to say. Nothing? Anything? Half the shit he says doesn’t need a real answer, anyway. But Tommy exhales, and he’s looking straight at Jon when he says, “Sure. Okay.”

So Jon’s not sure how weird it is when he ends up sitting in his driveway in a pair of too-big sweats and borrowed underwear. A little weird, sure, but after orgasms in someone’s kitchen in pursuit of some kind of fucked up psychosexual transference, you’ve already blown past most of the usual boundaries. This is, quite honestly, the least of Jon’s problems.

He brings his suit inside. Pundit greets him at the door, whining, and starts wriggling in delight when he crouches down to scratch behind her ears.

Jon looks over his shoulder, almost out of habit. Thinks about going down the street. He could. They always invite him in; he’ll end up on their sofa, dividing his attention between Twitter and _The Bachelorette_ on TV, whatever, and it’ll all feel so domestic, like nothing and everything he wants at the same time.

He hangs his suit somewhere deep in his closet, then changes and leaves Tommy’s clothes in a heap at the foot of his bed. “Let’s go for a run,” he tells Pundit, clipping on her leash, and makes a face at her when she gives a skeptical woof. “What, I go on runs. I’ve taken you on runs. Don’t give me that look.”

He steps into his shoes and lets Pundit lead him out the door. He pretends he can’t feel the the subtle itch along his shoulders, the way he keeps wanting to reorient himself: a needle swinging towards a magnetic pole, long after they’ve left their street behind them.

———

Two weeks to the wedding and Jon’s in DC, keeping busy. Two live shows, the March for Truth, an event with Tom Perriello in the run-up to the Virginia gubernatorial primary. The city feels weirdly desolate when he looks around. Jon keeps flashing back to summers past, trying to catalog all the changes from the obvious to the meaningless, and makes himself stop with some effort.

It’s not like he ever loved it here. He didn’t. There was so much about the culture of this place that stripped the life out of living, flattened emotions for the sake of optics and washed every word into sterility, and Jon could play the game for a while but not long enough, never long enough.

So it’s a lie, the faint nostalgic ache he gets when he casts back to his White House years. In 2009 the financial crisis was in full swing and everyone was demanding a solution like you could just adjust the state of the economy like a thermostat; in 2010 the Tea Party reps came swarming into Congress determined to be obstructive fucks, party over country over actual human lives. It sucked. But it’s weird, what sticks in the memory. The day the ACA passed, the vote tally running across chyrons, Favs falling back in his chair with his eyes closed and tension draining out of his body; the night Jon stayed up until three am for the president’s remarks for the DADT repeal, and Favs emailed him back fifteen minutes after he’d sent it out to say only, _This is great_. 

Or maybe it shouldn’t be such a surprise. Memory’s just a story you tell yourself, and he's spent years of his life trying to shape this one. What else could he do but remember: Favs at Jon and Tommy's place, grinning at him while finishing off his beer, and Jon already halfway to drunk on the sound of his laughter; being crammed in Favreau’s office, arguing with Tommy about some language on education policy and still turned towards Favs all the while, a flower to the sun.

Somewhere along the line, his brain had taken all these moments in time, every flicker of thought that he might fit here in this little corner of Washington despite all the rest of it, and laid a retroactive golden haze over the whole of DC. People are creatures of narrative; that’s inescapable.

“Hey,” Favs says when he calls in for the Monday pod, “how’re the old haunts these days?” and Jon grins, says, “Oh, exactly like what you’d think.” The other thought on his mind, he keeps to himself: the way one person’s presence can change the character of a place so completely, until it feels like home.

 

**part ii.**

Jim Comey flat-out calls the president of the United States a liar in front of the Senate Intelligence Committee and the American public, which is only like, the third most ridiculous thing that’s happened during this administration, but the world order stays intact long enough that there’s still a Maine _to_ fly to the week after that.

So on June seventeenth, Favs and Emily get married.

 _Please save the breaking news until after the vows at least_ , Favs posts before they leave. _I’m telling the club to turn off their wifi_ , says Emily. Jon likes both tweets, refreshes his timeline once, twice, then realizes what he’s doing and shuts off his phone, shoving it deep into his pocket for good measure.

The wedding’s gonna be great, because he is a goddamn adult who can be happy for his best friend and the woman he is going to marry. Whatever complications that exist are his own problem. Nobody’s gonna stand up at “speak now” and say yeah, actually, shut this thing down; the news cycle isn’t coming to save him, and he doesn’t need it to.

Still. It’s a long fucking weekend.

The guest list isn’t a hundred pages of extended Favreaus, Blacks, assorted friends going back three decades, and everyone they met once at a grocery store, but it’s pretty damn close. The party’s got parents, grandparents, siblings, nieces and nephews, favorite cousins, _ad infinitum_ ; but despite its size, Jon discovers, it’s somehow not quite big enough that he can lose track of Favs in the crowd, wherever he is.

Friday’s the rehearsal. Jon shakes hands with a few people who have no idea who he is, another few who tell him they listen to the pod, and one guy who stares at him before he says, “So you’re the gay one,” in a voice too loud to be friendly.

Jon is absolutely not going to pick a fight with someone’s great-uncle who’s been voting Republican for half a century, not going to be the person to ruin this wedding before it even gets started. So he grins and says, “Actually, I think there’s more than one of us,” which is true in general and has a good statistical chance of applying to this particular crowd as well, then extricates himself by attaching himself to the next tall body walking by.

It turns out to be Tommy.

“Well, you look great,” Tommy says without missing a beat.

Jon glances up at Tommy, who looks way too put together for someone who just spent like an hour overrun by several small Favreau children and at least one Favreau dog. “It’s a talent,” he says darkly, and then eyes the small knot of people around Favs and Emily. Andy’s having some kind of serious discussion with the maid of honor; the only part of Favs that's really visible is one arm at Emily’s waist while he faces the soon-to-be in-laws.

“Doesn’t the idea of a wedding rehearsal strike you as inherently ridiculous?” Jon says as they start a slow circuit around the rows of chairs. “Like, yeah, we’re gonna _almost_ get married, but then actually do it tomorrow. And everyone just goes along with it! This has gotta be the only important life event that people practice for. You got birth, right, can’t practice that; death, I mean, only in rare circumstances; and then here’s marriage, which you can do in like, one night in Vegas with a Sharpie, but now it’s just this massively choreographed— _thing_ , like some kind of ineffective attempt at compensation for the entire rest of it—”

“Is this how you’ve been frightening all the distant relatives?” Tommy says, mouth twitching. “A tirade on the futility of marriage as an institution—”

“Not as an institution, as a circus, all right? Marriage is fine. Marriage is like, you wanna come home to the same person every night and _also_ get tax benefits. That’s great, let’s all aspire to that, but like, this has nothing to do with that, it’s just a— a _charade_.” Jon takes a breath, lets it out slowly. “Also, I haven’t frightened any relatives, I’m a great conversationalist.”

“Of course.”

“Not that you really need to be, here. I mean, run into someone’s great-great-step aunt, tell ‘em gosh, don’t the bride and groom make _such_ a lovely couple, and then all you gotta do is hum and nod for the next ten minutes.”

“Sounds like you got it all figured out,” Tommy says, and pauses. “They do, though, don’t they.”

“What?”

Tommy’s gaze is a little wistful. Jon can’t quite see what he’s looking at, at first, but then one of the many, stupidly tall Favreaus moves off and Jon gets an unimpeded view of the way Emily leans into Favs’ shoulder, just for a moment; the way Favs drops his head to say something in her ear before they both straighten up and keep going.

“Yeah,” Jon says, a beat too slow. “Yeah, they do.”

“Come on,” Tommy says, suddenly sounding tired. “I think they want to pair us up with the bridesmaids now.”

———

It’s technically Saturday, the clock ticked over to a few minutes past midnight, and Jon’s current situation is a little too familiar: trying to string words together for a deadline that’s down to hours, not days, and coming up with nothing. He might almost be back in the White House, except back in those days he wasn't the one who had to deliver whatever came out of the process.

There’s a toast Jon’s supposed to be giving pretty damn soon, and he doesn’t have one to give.

Not that he hasn't _written_ a toast. He has. He’s got it on notecards and everything. It’s just that it’s a bad toast. Or, not even bad, but lifeless. _Boring_.

He tears his first draft apart until he has to admit it’s unsalvageable, stares at a blank Word doc for another half hour, and then finally wanders down and out of the house altogether, laptop in tow. Going somewhere new might help, might not, but in any case he can’t do this crammed here where it feels like his suit takes up half the air in the room just by existing.

There’s an ocean like, right next door, so whatever. Late night writing session on the beach. It’ll all be very picturesque, if nothing else.

He's not the only one with the idea.

“Lovett?”

There’s a raspy quality that slides into Favs’ voice sometimes, when he’s been turning over words and finding them all insufficient for whatever vision he’s got in his head. He sounds like that now, legs stretched out in front of him toward the water and his tablet a square of light across his thighs. “What are you doing out here?”

“What am I— what are _you_ doing out here?” Jon looks him up and down, pointedly looks back to the house. “Aren’t you supposed to be getting married soon? Maybe like, later today?”

“I—” Favs laughs a little, looks back down at his lap. “I wanted to look over the vows.”

 _Looking over_ he could do anywhere; yet here he is, one am on his wedding day on a rocky beach, face lit up with pale electronic light. 

Jon sighs and drops to the ground next to Favs. There are cool stones digging into his palms, a breeze kicking up, but Favs is radiating heat at his side. “2010,” he says, like it’s the middle of a conversation they’ve been having. “State of the Union.”

But Favs gets it. “Yeah,” he says. “I’ve been thinking that, too.”

“So what’d you do to prep for this one,” Jon says. “Read a bunch of vows—”

“Traditional and modern,” Favs says, a grin tugging up a side of his mouth. “References for form and content.”

“And then you— what, talked to _yourself_ about what you want in the speech?”

“I was gonna make a list.” Favs shifts a foot, and a pebble goes skittering into the dark. “You know how we used to complain about how you have to talk about fucking— everything, like you got the economy, and foreign policy, infrastructure, energy, education— and then all the departments come in and want to add more stuff—”

“Yeah, like we’re not already fighting the limited attention span of every member of Congress—”

“Right? But it’s the fucking state of the union, so you can’t not do it, it’s all _relevant_. And that’s kind of where I am right now, ‘cause how do I— how do I talk about how much I love her when it’s not just one or two things, you know, it’s everything?”

He loves her, Jon thinks. And he’s had that thought before, but it’s different this time; it doesn’t come with the hollow realization that Jon will never have him. It’s just a fact. Jon Favreau loves Emily Black. He’s going to marry her, and, if Jon knows anything at all, he’ll spend the rest of his life trying to live up to his promises. To love and cherish and all that, every word of it.

“God,” Jon says out loud, “you’re going to be insufferable.”

“What’s that?”

Jon can see it now, crystal clear. “You and Emily are gonna be one of those couples where you’re like, in your nineties and still holding hands to walk down the street, aren’t you?”

He’s looking out to the sea, but he can still hear the smile when Favs answers, imagine the exact shape of his grin. “You think so?”

“Yeah.” Jon swallows. “Yeah, you’re— fifty years from now, we’re all gonna be back here for like, your vow renewal ceremony, because you guys are the kind of people who’ll _do_ that, and it seems impossible now but you’re gonna look even more smitten then you will tomorrow, it’ll be _sickening_.”

Because Favs never does anything by halves; because he puts his whole heart into making things better than they are. Favs believes in hope, and for a minute, sitting with him on the day of his marriage, Jon can almost believe it, too, bright and shining.

“Fifty years, huh.” Favs straightens, and his shoulder brushes Jon’s, a fleeting point of contact. “You sound pretty confident you’re gonna be invited.”

“Of course I am,” says Jon. “And you know what? Maybe next time I’ll be sitting on Emily’s side.”

———

The wedding is beautiful.

It almost looks like a picture when Jonathan Favreau says, “Emily, I want to build a life with you.” Jon’s the last of the groomsmen, and he's looking at Emily as Judge Black says his last words, solemn and steady; as Leo brings up the rings, and Favs tilts his head down and kisses her, soft and reverent.

Emily has her hands clasped around her husband's neck, looking at him with quiet wonder, and they deserve this, the small universe they've carved out for themselves. Jon joins in the applause, and when he finds himself smiling, hard enough to hurt, he means it. He does.

———

“Hi,” Jon says, fumbling with the microphone. Andy’s already given a toast, then a bridesmaid whose name Jon doesn't remember, and the crowd’s getting a little looser, harder to read. Not that it was much of his crowd to begin with; it’s a bunch of Catholics and Ohioans, two groups that might be fine in small, select doses but are never going to add up to something that Jon’s comfortable about on a visceral level.

“I’m Jon,” he says, trying to find some footing, “Jon Lovett, and I’ve known Jon Favreau since he, uh, posed inappropriately with a piece of cardboard and nearly cost his boss a Secretary of State.” Soft laughter. “Which is why I just wanted to come up here and say— Emily. Good luck.”

More laughter. There’s Ben Rhodes with a rueful grin, Tommy smiling into his drink. And then there’s Favs, one arm around Emily and looking up at Jon, like there’s nowhere else he’d rather be, like there’s nothing else he’d rather do than sit here and listen to Jon speak. Jon’s seen that expression so often he knows it by heart.

There are notecards in his pocket. He leaves them there.

“When Jon hired me in 2009,” he says, “because someone thought giving him that much responsibility was a good idea— yeah, that’s the hope-change campaign for you, apparently they meant it— I spent a while waiting for the other shoe to drop. Because you had this guy who’d spent the last few years writing about hope and change in politics, and like— who does that except crazy people?

“So I started this job, deeply skeptical, just absolutely convinced that there was something very wrong with this guy—”

“That doesn't excuse the lack of pants, Lovett,” Favs calls out, and Jon grins, pauses for a moment to let the laughter wash over him.

The mic’s slipping in his hand. He adjusts his grip and clears his throat. “But I eventually discovered something even _worse_ , which is that Jon Favreau actually believed in everything he said. 

“Politics is a dirty business. You spend a couple years in Washington with ulterior motives lurking around every corner—sometimes two or three of them at once, wearing sunglasses and a trenchcoat—and it becomes so easy to let yourself start thinking that way. Everything sucks, the world’s on fire. Who’s got time for hope?

“But Jon did, no matter what happened, and it’s tempting to dismiss this as naiveté but I think— to stay in a place where everything’s eating away at your morals, and to still have the courage to believe in humans, in a better future— it speaks to a strength of character that I frankly wasn’t sure people could have, until I saw Jon keep on doing it, day in and day out.

“Turns out he wasn’t crazy; he just wanted to make the world a better place.”

Favs is looking suspiciously bright-eyed. Jon has to swallow before he goes on.

“So Emily. This guy is your husband now, which is quite a feat given that we all thought Jon would end up married to either Barack Obama or a book of Ted Kennedy speeches— and even though he’s useless when confronted with scary movies, or small insects, or anyone yelling at him over a parking space, you can count on him for the things that matter most: when you need someone to believe in you, and when you need to believe in the goodness of people.

“Thank you, and congratulations. To the Favreaus!”

He ducks off the stage to applause, the sight of Emily with her face in her hands; and then Favs is on his feet, pulling Jon into a fierce hug.

“Hey,” Favs says wetly, “thanks.”

“Yeah,” Jon says into his shoulder, and laughs. “Listen, now that I’ve said a lot of nice things about you, maybe you should really think about letting the pants thing go.”

———

There’s the first dance, when Emily and Favs both look so fucking happy it almost hurts to look at; then there’s a second dance, and a third, people slowly spilling onto the dance floor. The parents get involved—Jon sees Emily take a turn with both her mom and dad—and the guests are pairing off left and right, it’s all very lovely and festive.

Jon skirts the edge of the crowd, finds a vodka and lemonade to down with a wince, and claims another cup for later before he starts planning his escape. He’s pretty sure he can avoid having to dance if he looks purposeful enough. He nods to Dan and Howli, passes Ben talking animatedly into his phone, tells David Axelrod a little about how Crooked Media’s doing. (Blue Apron has graduated from irate emails to legal-sounding letters. Axe suggests a company lawyer.)

Up ahead, Tommy's just leaving the dance floor, nodding politely at whoever’d been his partner. Jon’s already veering in that direction when someone says, “Lovett!” and folds him into a hug.

“Emily!” Jon gives her his best grin and starts carefully untangling himself. She’s flushed and giggly, so— drunk. Not drunk enough that she can’t stay upright, but he leaves one arm in her grip just in case. “Married for six hours and already you’re throwing yourself at other men, what will Jon say?”

“Jon knows, and he’s very happy for us,” Emily says conspiratorially, then bursts into laughter, delighted enough that it doesn’t matter that Jon’s answering grin doesn’t fit as well as it should. She’s gesturing somewhere behind her; Jon notes the glowstick bracelets at her wrists and circlet haloed atop her head with a faint sense of resignation. “Jon, come give Lovett one of the—”

“Hey.” And here’s Favs, emerging from the crowd and dropping a kiss by Emily’s ear. He looks relaxed in a way that only happens when he's very happy and fairly drunk at the same time. “You need something?”

The last time Jon saw him like this was in New Orleans.

“Glowstick for Lovett,” says Emily, “maybe like a necklace, it can match his tie—”

“Nope,” Jon says, “definitely do not need that,” but Favs is already leaning forward to pick up an uncracked one from one of the nearby tables. He snaps it in his hands; the neon glow starts from between his fingers, spreads out and out.

“Thirty-five, Favreau,” Jon mutters, “you are _at least_ a decade too old for this,” but he doesn't move as Favs loops the thing around his neck. A brush of something over his nape, a warm forearm briefly pressed to his shoulder while Favs links the ends together, then he’s stepping back, pleased.

“There,” Favs says. “Looks good.”

“Ridiculous,” Jon says. The glowstick feels strange lying across his clavicles. He’s acutely aware of it when he moves; when he swallows.

“ _Great_ ,” Emily says to the both of them, “he looks great,” and takes up Jon’s hand. “Hey, Jon, come dance with me.”

Jon barks out a laugh, surprised. “Sure you’ve got the right Jon there? You know your husband’s the other one.” He jerks his head towards Favs, tries for a motion with his hand.

“Lovett.” Emily won’t let Jon slip out of her grasp. “It’s my wedding! You can’t say no to a dance with the bride.”

“Come on, Lovett,” Favs says, and fuck, he’s almost glowing with how happy he is, watching Emily tug Jon onto the dance floor. “You don’t want to dance with my wife?”

Jon wants a lot of things; it’s just his luck that they’re all things he can’t have.

“Yeah, all right,” he says, “ _one_ dance, you can’t pull that card twice,” and lets himself be led into the crowd. Hell, it’s almost poetic. Something bouncy streaming from the speakers, Emily’s fingers twined through his. He looks over Emily’s shoulder, sees the whole tableau spread out like a picture. There’s the Favreau parents; there’s Alyssa, Cody, the whole crew in some kind of beautifully photogenic Obama alumni reunion; there’s Tommy, throwing back the last of his drink before he ducks down, reaches a hand out for Leo.

And there’s Favs, lit up with joy, a wedding band on his finger. It’s everything Jon could’ve ever wanted.

“Congrats,” he says to Emily, quiet, “Emily Black Favreau, huh,” and lets her, when she leans up to kiss his cheek.

———

By the end of the night, Jon is so sick of Maine he could vomit. The lobsters and the rocks and the ocean and the endless cooing about how beautiful the wedding was, how perfect the couple are for each other, how lovely their _children_ will be, because of course, Jonathan Favreau’s one fault is that he has yet to provide the world with two-point-five tiny, adorable versions of himself—

So yeah, Maine fucking sucks.

He runs into Tommy on the way back to the house. The night’s turned cooler but Tommy’s got his suit jacket slung over one shoulder, his guitar on the other side. His posture’s as straight as ever, but seeing the shape of his silhouette makes something in Jon come unraveled anyway.

Jon’s been loudly, enthusiastically happy going on about twelve hours now. He hadn’t even had to fake all of it, but that kind of performance is hard to keep up even when he’s not biting back half the things he wants to say. It’s a relief, to think that Tommy knows. He gets it. Jon doesn’t need to give Tommy the version of himself with all the edges sanded down.

“Lovett,” Tommy says, and for a minute he sounds as exhausted as Jon feels. “I was just—” He’s slowing down, letting Jon catch up to his side. He doesn’t finish the thought.

“So,” Jon says conversationally, as they walk. “You look like shit.” Not in the obvious way: actually, Tommy looks a lot like he had this morning. He’s still got his tie on, the knot tugged only a touch looser from his throat, and maybe there’s a spot by his temple where his hair, sweat-damp, is starting to curl. With Tommy, it’s the little things. His fingers pressed tight into the fabric of his jacket; the nearly imperceptible edge to the set of his mouth.

Jon, meanwhile, has his tie slung around his neck, the top button of his shirt undone, which is all probably a metaphor for the way he feels like he’s about to fall apart in four directions at once.

Tommy laughs, though it’s not much of one. “Guess I don’t need to ask how your night’s been.”

Jon gives him a grin that’s mostly teeth. “You know what, it’s been a fun few months,” he says, “really, fucking fantastic, but I am more than ready for everything to go back to normal.”

“Normal?”

“You know.” Jon tips his head back, exhales into the sky. “No more endless planning, all this buildup, just—” he slides a hand through the air “—it happened. It’s over. Don’t have to think about it anymore.”

“Ah,” Tommy says. “That normal.”

In a few days, Jon will stop feeling like this, raw and unsteady, all the parts of him he’s tried to ignore for years dragged out into the open. Jon will go back home, and it will be easier to breathe because he taught himself how to survive in Los Angeles in a way he doesn’t know how to here, on the wrong coast, in someone else’s life.

In a few days, it won’t matter that Favs is married, just like it didn’t matter when he wasn’t married, and he will start the process of getting over Jon Favreau all over again.

The house is dark when they get there. Tommy waves Jon ahead of him on the narrow stairs, offers a quiet, “Night,” before he peels off into his room just past the landing. Jon’s is farther down the hallway; he settles onto the bed with a thump when he gets there, stays there for a minute with his eyes closed before he can muster up the energy to kick off his shoes.

When he sits up again to work on the buttons of his shirt, Tommy’s standing in the doorway, looking at him. He’s lost the jacket and the guitar but not the stiffness in his shoulders, and Jon’s struck with a memory of some night in— it must’ve been a couple months after Tommy started on the NSC. He doesn’t remember the context of it, just the way Tommy had looked, tired of bad news and tired of keeping secrets and just— tired.

“What,” Jon says. Tommy was right about the fit of the suit: the fabric’s pulled tight across the top of his thighs. He drops his gaze down Tommy’s legs, which are stupidly long, and back up in time to see Tommy swipe a hand over his face.

“Look,” Tommy says, and stops. “Do you need anything?”

Jon blinks. Does he need anything? Half a dozen answers come up on his tongue. A new president. A Democratic Congress. The sheets from his own bed and Pundit snuffling beside him and someone to tell him to stop being stupid back in 2009, a lifetime ago.

What he says instead is, “Wanna come in and fuck me, then.”

Tommy’s fingers stiffen where they’re wrapped around the door frame. “Lovett.”

Jon sighs. “Never mind.” He undoes the buttons of his cuffs, starts at the ones running down his chest. “You can— whatever.”

The door shuts with a quiet click. Jon doesn’t look up until Tommy’s hand closes around his wrist.

“Can I—” Tommy says, and there’s the same desperate note in the question that’s been stuck in the back of Jon’s throat all week. He nods; for a moment, he’s fixed on the pale flicker of Tommy’s eyelashes, while Tommy sits down next to Jon and slips the next button free with careful fingers.

Jon lets Tommy undress him and press him down, down, down onto the bed. Tommy gasps, “Jon,” once, when he’s sliding his hands under the open halves of Tommy’s shirt, and again before he comes, the rest of his words flattened to shapelessness against the skin of Jon’s shoulder.

 

**part iii.**

They land late in the evening, and Jon hates LAX but at least it’s easy to hate this. He doesn’t have to think to run through all the familiar complaints—the traffic’s a mess, the food’s worthless—and he doesn’t have to feel guilty about any of it, which was maybe the worst part of Maine.

“So, pod tomorrow?” Tommy asks while they’re waiting for their rides outside the terminal. Jon’s trying to remember if there’s anything edible in his house, because it’s not like he can just go over to— it’s probably safer to pick up something. So: food. Then Pundit. “Or honestly, we could push it back, it’ll be fine if the post-wedding ep comes out a day late.”

“Let’s not call it the post-wedding ep,” Jon says, then scrubs at his face. “I don’t know, look, we should wait and see how we’re feeling tomorrow. Because like, if we did decide to do it, and then it turned out that you’re too hungover, then you’d feel shitty because you’re hungover _and_ because you can’t make the pod. I’m just saying, why do that to yourself?”

Tommy gives him a flat look. “But maybe ‘I’ only had a couple of mimosas at brunch, so that doesn't seem like a really big concern.”

Jon can hear the quotation marks in that sentence. “Okay, but maybe ‘you’ realize there's still a good twelve hours between now and tomorrow morning, and in that time a lot of things could happen.”

“Lovett,” Tommy says, dropping the pronouns, “are you—”

“Tommy, that was a hypothetical.” Jon’s Lyft is struggling toward him on the app. He grabs his carry-on and takes a couple of steps forward. “Look, don't worry about it, all right? I’m gonna consume some normal, non-lobster themed food—” the car, pulling up to the curb “—and then sleep until Pundit wakes me up begging for breakfast, these are _very_ wild Sunday night plans.”

“There’s no way you have food in the house,” Tommy points out as Jon's shoving his case in the back. “Lobster-themed or otherwise.”

Jon lifts up his phone, sliding into the front seat with a grin. “Not if Del Taco has anything to say about it,” he says, and shuts the door.

———

Despite what Tommy might think, Jon doesn’t actually go get wasted. He’s not in his twenties anymore, and he knew even then that it was useless to want something, and stop there. You had to either go for it, or move on, and he’d known for years where the choice fell on this one.

So he goes back to his house. He tips the driver, finishes up the last of his burrito standing in his darkened driveway, drops off his luggage just inside the door and then goes to get Pundit.

Pundit yelps until Jon kneels down to let her lick at his face, when he picks her up from the daycare. “Hey, girl,” he croons, “you miss me?” while she butts her head into his chest, insistent, tail wagging frantically. He’s missed her, too. He always forgets, until he’s left her again, just how much he will: it’s so simple, the way she loves him, when the rest of the world is so complicated.

He lets Pundit up onto the bed when he gets home, then makes himself unpack. Better to do it now, instead of leaving everything in the corner of the foyer where he’ll get used to it. It’s mostly clothes, anyway. He throws the shirt in the laundry with the underwear and socks, hangs the rest of the suit up in the closet and stares blankly at it for a minute. It’s supposed to be dry-cleaned. He probably shouldn’t ask Favs to take it in the next time he’s dropping by the cleaners.

At Jon’s feet, Pundit’s scrabbling at his knees. “Hey,” he says, sitting down on the floor so he can tug at the crumpled gray thing she’s dragging behind her. “What’ve you got there?”

It’s a pair of sweatpants, too big to be his. Jon frowns at them, trying to make out the faded letters down the side, before he remembers. Tommy had lent them to him— god, last month. When they’d picked up their fucking suits. 

The fabric is soft and fluffy under his hands. Jon keeps it clutched in his fist for the space of a breath. Two. Remembers, abruptly, one of those Parachute ads with the stupid hypothetical questions and ends up laughing into his knees.

Pundit’s whining at him, trying to scramble into his lap. “Hey,” he says, catching his breath, “it’s fine, I’m fine, don’t look so worried.” He strokes her down the side, then gets up and nudges the closet door shut. Maybe that’s the wrong tense. But whatever. He _will_ be fine, and in the meantime they’ve got things to do. Mitch McConnell isn’t gonna wait for him to get his shit together.

———

Tommy gives Jon a sideways look the next time they see each other, but it’s gone by the time Jon finishes writing out HEALTHCARE WEEK across a window in big, blocky print. And that’s fine, Jon thinks, they don’t need to— what, make small talk about a wedding neither of them enjoyed very much, pretend that Tommy didn’t leave a bite mark atop Jon’s clavicle that’s still visible three days later, while they were both thinking of someone else? What’d be the point? It’d be an exercise in masochism more than anything.

So Jon learns how to say the word “honeymoon” until it feels almost natural in his mouth, to look at pictures of Favs’ left hand without flinching, and buries the whole thing like he should have done in Maine. In New Orleans. In DC.

It gets easier, every time. He’s had a lot of practice by now.

———

On Tuesday, Jon and Tommy call their state senators, and then the Senate Minority Leader, all before they go over to the studio to record the pod they didn’t end up doing Monday after all. It’s actually a pretty productive day. And look, Jon doesn’t feel _great_ , this whole healthcare debacle is like yelling at a bus coming at you full-speed and hoping that the driver’s just partially deaf instead of evil, but— he kind of believes it when Chuck Schumer tells them, “We can win this fight.” Jon’s always done his best under tight conditions, anyway.

“I feel good about this,” he tells Tommy on their way back to the office, “like, that felt like a good pod, you know? It was substantive, we focused on healthcare but still touched on the Syria stuff and press access, and like, Schumer basically said we should be terrified but hopeful, which, kind of a running theme since November, don’t you think?”

“It was good,” Tommy agrees. He’s backing into a parking space, so all Jon can see for a moment is the fine blond hair at the back of his head, the twisted column of his neck. “I mean, obviously we’re all reading the news and following like, Andy and Topher Spiro on Twitter but still, it’s good to hear from someone who’s right there about how they’re trying to fight this bullshit.”

“Although I gotta say,” Jon says, “I was _not_ convinced on the filibuster by amendment issue. I mean, yeah, none of this is on the level, McConnell can change the rules at any time, but if the result is gonna be the same either way, why not do it anyway? Like, stop doing political calculus on a fight you know you’ve lost and do it because it’s right, and if it fails then at least you would’ve tried, instead of failing while doing _nothing_.”

The engine shuts off. Jon’s out of the car and halfway to slamming the door closed when he realizes Tommy hasn’t moved.

“Hey, Tommy.” He sticks his head back in the car. “C’mon, it’s hot as hell out here.”

It takes Tommy a minute to turn to look at Jon. “You're right,” he says. “That’s what we've been saying, right? The Democrats in the Senate, and the White House Correspondents’ Association, and—” He slides the key out from the ignition, curls his fingers around it. ”They should all try. The act of doing something matters, especially if that's the only thing you have left.”

“Of course I'm right,” Jon says, watching Tommy run his thumb idly down the side of his thigh. “It's how we distinguish ourselves from people like Marco Rubio.” 

Tommy bursts into startled laughter at that; Jon grins at him. “Now come on, we've got stuff to do.”

———

The week after—when they’ve talked to Nancy Pelosi and Joe Manchin, and Favs stops pretending, badly, to be away from Twitter—Tommy and Favs decide to go to the protest on the Hill. Jon’s halfway to booking a plane ticket himself before he remembers he’s got other plans.

“Fuck,” he says, letting his phone drop onto the sofa. “I can’t, I have that thing in Aspen.”

Jon’s invited himself and Pundit over to Tommy’s, because Tommy's not dogsitting anymore and accordingly his house is once again too quiet to live in. Or at least, that's what Jon had assumed from the way Tommy had been petting Pundit way more at the office, going home later and later at night. He’d been like that in DC, too, when they were living with Mike and Cody, and from what Jon’s gathered from Tommy’s occasional remarks, his place in Chicago during the campaign was just a couple Greek letters short of a frat house. 

Jon has no fucking idea why Tommy doesn’t just get himself a dog. Something big and demanding and affectionate. It’d be good for him.

“Right, your live show,” Tommy says, and pauses. It takes him a minute to look up from his laptop. There’s a tiny crease between his eyebrows, but his voice is casual when he says, “I mean, there’ll be other protests. Realistically speaking.”

“Obviously there’ll be other protests.” Jon doesn’t bother keeping the edge out of his words. “At the rate things are going, we might be doing protests once a week ‘til November 2018. And you're gonna go, which is fine, you’ll do the thing with Favs— hey, maybe you guys can enjoy like a nice drink together, if he's got any left over—”

“Oh, come on,” Tommy says with more heat than Jon expects, “you're not _still_ mad about the fucking wine—”

“It's not about the _wine_ , it's about how you didn't even ask, like it didn't occur to you at all that you could—”

“I didn't ask you,” Tommy says, clipped, “because I thought you wouldn't want to think about it.”

Beat. Tommy's gone an angry pink across his cheekbones. One of his shoulders jerks minutely, a tense, suppressed movement, and Jon finds himself looking past Tommy to the wall behind him, has a sudden vivid memory of Tommy’s mouth at his throat. The slant of afternoon light across the floor; one of Tommy’s hands wrapped around his bicep, hard enough to hurt. The way it’d felt afterwards, the same steady ache of wanting something you couldn’t have.

Jon exhales, breathes past something hollow behind his ribs. He lets his eyes drop to catch a glimpse of Pundit under the table, tucked up against Tommy’s shins, and something about that in this moment strikes him as monumentally unfair.

“Don’t make this about Jon,” he says. “That’s total bullshit, Tommy, this is about you.”

“Sure.” There’s a bitter twist to Tommy’s mouth when Jon drags his gaze back up. “I’m the one who’s making this about him.”

There’s something layered in that that Jon can’t parse. Jon doesn’t know why that comes as such a surprise; Tommy’s holding himself very still, all the air in the room gone heavy and quiet, and Jon has no idea what that means. 

All these years Jon had known Tommy, he thought he'd finally figured out all of Tommy's secrets.

“DC sucks this time of year,” he says finally, some kind of ceasefire. “Who the hell thought this was a good idea?”

Tommy smiles, a little strained. “Fuck Mitch McConnell for that, too,” he says, and gets to his feet. “Look, I’m gonna go pack, my flight’s in the morning.”

“Sure,” Jon says. He watches Tommy retreat into his room, close the door almost gently. He’d thought he wanted a fight; he doesn’t know what this is. He wishes Tommy were easier to read, instead of a puzzle Jon’s put together a thousand different times.

Pundit’s whining across the room. “Sorry,” he mutters, dropping to the floor beside her so she can crawl into his lap. He pets her until she goes quiet, staring at the clean, blank surface of Tommy’s door.

He lets himself out after, and goes home. When the pictures from DC start coming in, he’s prepping for a livestream in Colorado.

———

Aspen’s fine, then it’s the Fourth of July, and by the time all three of them are back in LA again about forty-five new political crises have already sprung up and died in between. At least they’re still in the middle of Congressional recess: a few more days where these cowards have to dodge constituents in person instead of hiding behind their staffers. God, he hopes someone yells at Ted Cruz. Maybe tapes it, for good measure.

So that’s a break in the crazy cycle of domestic news, which of course means that while Trump's in Hamburg signing over America to Vladimir Putin, North Korea successfully tests an ICBM.

“Hey, Tommy,” Jon says. They’ve rearranged the desks in the office again so now they're all facing each other, but Tommy’s eyes are on his laptop. Jon scribbles down _Walter Shaub - OGE_ on his notecard and frowns at it, a little showy.

“Yeah,” Tommy says, distracted. “What’s up?”

“Wanna come on tonight’s show to talk about the G-20 and the imminent nuclear demise of Alaska?”

It takes Tommy a moment to answer. Maybe, Jon thinks, he’ll say no.

Favs had come back from DC looking unfairly good, Italian tan still intact and nearer to glowing than anybody’s got a right to be, but at least things are straightforward with him. In some ways, Favs hasn’t changed at all: he still laughs the same, bright and joyful and open, and if Jon closes his eyes it could almost be 2009 again. Meanwhile, Tommy spent the Fourth of July weekend out sailing like the WASP parody he is, brought back a fading sunburn and a weird tension around his mouth when he looks at Jon, and Jon’s still trying to figure out how, exactly, this became so fucked up without him noticing a thing. 

But if Tommy’s waiting for some kind of apology, it’s gonna be a long time. Jon tries not to apologize as a rule, doubly so when he has no idea what the fuck it’d be for. He almost wishes Tommy would just snap and get it over with.

“Sure,” Tommy says, apparently determined to drag this out into the next decade. “Yeah, those are nice, cheerful topics. Good way to spend a Friday night.” 

“Great,” Jon says, only faintly resentful, and adds another index card to his pile. “We can like, grab something to eat before the show, talk about how it’s gonna go.”

He’s pretty sure Tommy had other plans for the night. Tommy doesn’t even blink before he says, “Okay.”

“Okay. Good.” Jon’s beginning to feel like he’s losing at some game he doesn’t know the rules to. Maybe he’ll make Tommy pay for dinner. “We’re all set, then.”

“Yep,” Tommy says. He’s still looking at Jon when he tosses over to the other side of the office, “Hey, tell Emily sorry I can’t make it to _Lovett or Leave It_ with you guys, turns out I’m gonna be in it.”

Favs, at his desk, is laughing softly into his SmartWater. Yeah, Jon decides. He’s definitely making Tommy pay.

———

They end up getting dinner right across from the Hollywood Improv. After they put in their order, there’s a weird pause where they’re just staring at each other over their drinks. Tommy takes a hasty gulp of his gluten-free IPA because apparently he’s attempting to go native, while Jon sips at the ridiculous cocktail with a ridiculous name he’d ordered mostly out of spite.

“So how was DC,” he says. Tommy had looked thrilled to be back in the Senate offices in the pictures, him and Favs. And Jon, scrolling through Twitter in a hotel room two time zones away, had thought about what it meant that the two of them had stayed nearly ten years in Washington before they’d finally pried themselves free.

Tommy and Favs had followed Barack Obama through the Senate and two successful presidential campaigns, gone from _underdog_ to _top of the world_. And Jon liked Obama, had enjoyed working for him, but ultimately DC was a place he could leave; he doesn’t know if that’s true for the two of them. They’ve put too much of themselves in the city, maybe, to ever stop missing it completely.

“DC was good,” Tommy says after a pause, like he’s answering a much more complicated question. “We talked to a lot of great people, got their stories. Ran into, you know, friends of the pod, people we know.”

“Yeah,” Jon says. “Yeah, it sounded— I mean, the puns were terrible, I gotta say, not a fan—”

Tommy smiles, a faint shift at the corner of his mouth. “It was good that we went,” he says, “I think— I mean, I hope it's gonna help, but you know, I— we missed you out there.” And that’s not— it’s one of those things that doesn’t mean anything, but Tommy’s looking at him carefully and it’s like an ugly knot of tension is starting to come unraveled between them, something that never should’ve been there at all.

Jon’s missed this, he thinks, surprised: the easy way Tommy had fit into his life, long before Maine and New Orleans, all of it.

“Of course you missed me,” he says as their food arrives, “I’m indispensible,” and watches Tommy break into a slow, delighted grin.

“Well. Let’s not go that far.”

“You know what, if you’re not nice to me I’m gonna kick you off my show.” Jon steals an enchilada from Tommy’s plate, bites pointedly into the end of it. It’s pretty good. Probably still not worth the price listed on the menu. “All right, so let’s talk about how this is gonna go.”

Jon’s got the interview with Villaraigosa first, which he probably shouldn’t move, but he can put Tommy on after that. A light interlude on war and treason, before they start on the panel and all the ways they’re fucked domestically.

“Maybe I should just pencil you in hereafter,” he muses, finishing up his first taco. “What are the odds that increasingly batshit Russia news _doesn’t_ break every week from here on out?”

“Did you just claim all my Friday nights indefinitely?” Tommy raises an eyebrow, fork poised over his plate. His back’s to the window and the light, filtering in, picks out all the gold in his hair. It's a picture.

“This is the Resistance, Tommy.” Jon fishes his phone out from his pocket, opens up a new recurring event on the office Google calendar. “You don’t get to have things like free time, or a sane president, or a Speaker of the House who doesn’t just have CUT THE TOP MARGINAL TAX RATE in big letters where his sense of shame should be.”

“Yeah, you definitely don’t have any free time at all.” Tommy laughs, reaching over to take the phone from Jon’s hand. “So hey, is _Global clusterfuck_ the name of my segment, because I gotta say, not your best work.”

“Wow, book a guy twice and suddenly he’s giving himself whole segments on my show.” He tries to take the phone back, but Tommy’s pulled it out of reach. “And by the way, ‘global clusterfuck’ is simple, evocative, memorable, I am a communications _professional_ —”

“Low-effort,” Tommy informs him, typing something out with his stupidly big hands, “it could be anybody.” He finishes with a flourish and presses the phone back into Jon’s grip. “This is better.”

And Jon doesn’t know what it is about this moment that makes it click: the pleased turn of Tommy’s mouth and the faint pink the evening’s washed over his cheeks, the warmth of Tommy’s fingers curved loosely around his. Maybe it’s all of those things, or none of them—if the past year’s taught Jon anything, it’s to stop looking for one right answer when it comes to the messy reality of people. 

Besides, knowing wouldn’t change anything in the way Tommy’s grinning at him, the easy slant of their bodies toward each other; the curl of something warm in Jon’s stomach. He could keep doing this, he thinks. Today and tomorrow, next week and next month and next year. He _wants_ to, soft lighting and tablecloths and all, if— if—

Tommy’s still looking at him, his smile half a question, and Jon’s on his feet with too many words caught in his throat.

“I have to—” He’s breathless, his voice gone high and cracked; he stops and tries again. “It’s getting late, I gotta go talk to the panel before the show starts.” His hand feels like it’s marked in neon, all along the places where Tommy’s touched him. He shoves it into his pocket along with his phone and finds something crumpled brushing against the back of his fingers.

It’s a twenty-dollar bill. He blinks at it.

“Lovett?” Tommy, startled, halfway risen from his seat.

“For dinner,” Jon manages, throwing it into the space between them, “anyway, show starts at eight, you know where to go,” and flees.

———

Jon wrote a lot of jokes while he was at the White House—good jokes, jokes that made people laugh—but the work he’s most proud of are the policy speeches. The ones with a vision; the ones that said, _here’s how we can be better_.

They were also the hardest to write, because policy is boring. That’s the thing. The Democratic leadership might be a bunch of nerds, but most people started glazing over when the charts and numbers came out. Sure, that ten-year tax plan might be fantastic, but what was the point if most people stopped caring at year two, stopped listening at year five? People didn’t remember the moon shot speech for the NASA roadmap and the budget proposals. They remembered, “before this decade is out”; they remembered, “we choose to go to the moon.”

So he couldn’t just give people the facts. What was it that Favs always said? _Tell a story_.

And sometimes, Jon got stuck trying to tell the wrong one. He’d have a speech in pieces but it wouldn’t pull together into something coherent, something that made _sense_. It almost reminded him of late nights doing problem sets back in college: the same frustration of having hit a wall without knowing why, until he pulled back far enough to see the direction he should have gone in the first place.

There’s a story Jon’s been telling himself for a long time, DC to LA and all the places in between. And maybe somewhere along the way it had changed, or he’d changed. Nothing dramatic, just a steady, imperceptible drift until they didn’t quite fit together anymore.

Jon doesn’t check his phone until he’s inside the Improv. The screen’s gone dark, but past the lockscreen the calendar app’s still open. He stares at the neat green block of time that Tommy had saved as “Vietor Detour,” marked out week after week, and it feels like a choice.

_So what story are you living, Jon Lovett; what do you want?_

———

Saturday night, Tommy comes over, which Jon only discovers because Pundit starts barking at the front door.

“What the fuck,” Jon says when he yanks the door open and is suddenly confronted by a broad set of shoulders, the curve of Tommy’s spine. “Did I miss a memo or something?”

“Lovett.” Tommy jerks his head up, and then he’s unfolding from where he’s sitting on the porch. “No, uh, you didn’t— I was just gonna—” He shoves his hands in his pockets, then takes them back out. “Um,” he says. “Look.”

“Okay,” Jon says, and he should probably say something else except that Pundit chooses now to press past his legs and scramble outside. “Pundit, hey!”

“I got it.” Tommy’s already reaching for her, scooping her up with both hands. Pundit’s cradled against his chest when he straightens up, an armful of golden fur and twitching paws, which is an infuriatingly good look on him. Pundit, the traitor, yawns widely and then tucks her head into the gap between Tommy’s elbow and his side.

“You’ve stolen my dog’s affections,” Jon accuses. “How dare you.”

Tommy laughs, and that feels normal, familiar. “And here I am, trying to return them,” he says with a faint grin. “Can I come in?”

Jon hesitates for half a second before he steps back. “Yeah, sure,” he says. “This is a nice neighborhood, can’t have you skulking around in the dark.”

It’s not like he’s been avoiding Tommy. But he’d wanted some time to figure out the shape of his thoughts, and he couldn’t do that when Tommy kept looking at him like Jon was an answer all by himself. He’d done it on stage and he’d done it after the show, while Jon brought Favs and Emily around to introduce to the panel, and Jon didn’t have the words then to make out the question, doesn’t know if he has them now.

Tommy crouches down inside the foyer to let Pundit wriggle free again, and Jon stares at the back of his neck a little too long before he makes himself shake it off.

“You want like, a drink?” he offers. Tommy’s just getting up, dusting off one knee, and fuck, what is Jon even doing, he feels like he’s eighteen again, stupid and uncertain— he doesn’t know what he wants, he doesn’t know what _Tommy_ wants—

He starts for the kitchen just to have something to do, but Tommy catches him by a wrist. “I wanted to talk to you,” he says, the stubborn tilt of his mouth verging onto something reckless, and something about it reminds Jon of DC, where words were weapons and journalists wrote the final version of every story.

How long does it take to leave a place behind? 

“Okay,” Jon says. He looks up, his hand still in the circle of Tommy’s grip. “Talk, then.”

“I think I should have told you earlier.” Tommy’s speaking fast, his words tumbling over each other. “I wanted, for a long time— but I knew you were still hung up on Favs, so I couldn’t— not the way I wanted.”

“Tommy—” 

“I liked having dinner with you last night,” Tommy presses on. “I thought, it should’ve been like that before, when we— properly, not some kind of secret that got locked back up after. And it’s okay if you don’t want that, but I’m telling you because—” There’s a flush high on Tommy’s face; his eyes are very bright. “Because you should know,” he finishes, breathing hard. “So— and now you do.”

 _What’s the difference between Washington and Hollywood_ , someone had said to Jon once, his first month in LA. _Here, you can rewrite the ending as many times you want_.

“Jon?” Tommy’s taking a step backwards, letting Jon slip out of his grasp. “Do you want me to—”

Jon hauls him forward by the front of his shirt and kisses him.

Tommy makes a small, surprised noise against his mouth. Then he’s opening up, letting Jon in, and they’ve done this before but it feels like the first time, the way Tommy melts into him, the soft sound he makes when Jon brings a hand up to cup his jaw. 

“So was Friday like, a date,” Jon says when they finally break apart, “because I gotta say, not the best I’ve ever had—”

Tommy starts to laugh. “And whose fault was that,” he says, “you literally threw money at me and ran—”

“I had a show to prep for!” Jon tries to sound stern, but he’s not sure he can when Tommy’s pressed against him like this, warm and solid. “I’ll have you know that not all of us can get away with just showing up and looking pretty. Anyway, I didn’t say it was the _worst_ date I’ve had, you know, it was— passable—”

The edge of Tommy’s smile is looking very soft. Jon wants to touch it, so he does, sliding his thumb across the bottom curve of his lip to the corner of his mouth.

“Decent, maybe,” he allows while Tommy laughs. “Adequate, even—”

Tommy dips down to kiss him again, which is a blatant attempt at distraction. He’s lost his touch, out in California; the Tommy in the White House would’ve never been so obvious. It’s just that Jon is willing to be distracted.

“Hey.” He twists his head up, struck by a thought. “You called me Jon.”

Tommy stares back at him, steady. “I did.”

There are parts of Tommy that he doesn’t let Jon see, that Jon’s only pieced together from the kind of scraps that a friendship of eight, nine years leaves behind. He thinks, watching the line of Tommy’s throat tremble, that maybe Tommy’s not hiding anything now.

 _A long time_ , he had said.

“You,” Jon says, a hand flat against Tommy’s sternum, “are a fucking moron.”

Tommy’s mouth twitches. “A little bit.”

“I can’t believe you ever worked at the White House.” Is that the flutter of Tommy’s heart under Jon’s palm? Who knows. “You can— you can keep calling me that, you know, that is actually my name.”

There’s a smile breaking over Tommy’s face like sunrise. “Yeah?”

“Yeah,” Jon says, reaching up for him, and then they both give up on words for a while.

———

In the morning, Jon wakes up to the smell of coffee. The dip in the mattress next to him is faintly warm, and he’s pretty sure he can hear someone downstairs.

“It’s _Sunday_ ,” he complains to the empty spot beside him, and reluctantly gets out of bed.

Tommy’s pretty easy to find; Jon just follows the sound of his voice and finds him on the sofa, murmuring at Pundit who’s curled up on his feet. He’s not wearing a shirt, Jon notes, pleased. The mark he sucked onto Tommy’s shoulder last night is still dark on his skin. He’s a little tousled, faintly pink, and Jon wants to go mess him up all over again.

“Are you plotting with my dog?” he says instead, paused on the threshold. “I knew you were up to something.”

“Hey.” Tommy lifts his head up, grinning in a way that should probably be illegal before noon at least. “Don’t worry, we still love you best.”

The morning sun’s lit up the whole room in pale gold. It feels like it takes a lifetime to cross the floor before Jon gets to Tommy, who’s waiting like he fits there, like there’s nowhere else he’d rather be.

He’s halfway to climbing into Tommy’s lap when he realizes what Tommy’s wearing. “Those are,” he says, frowning at the sweats slung low on Tommy’s hips, “yours.”

“Yeah, I found them in your room.” Tommy pauses. “Unless you wanted to like, keep them.”

Jon’s life isn’t what he thought it’d be, at seventeen or twenty-two or twenty-nine. But he likes it. It took a long time and a lot of detours to get here, and he wouldn’t trade it for anything.

“I don’t know,” he says, settling on top of Tommy, “maybe I’ll just keep you,” and Tommy laughs, lets Jon press him down into the cushions, and says, bright and clear, “Yes.”

**Author's Note:**

> So I was decidedly _not_ going to write the sequel to Tradecraft, because I knew this story would have to be way more complicated, and yet 12k later here we are. It's been a journey. Thank you to [skylinethroughthewindow](https://skylinethroughthewindow.tumblr.com/) and [nahco3](/users/nahco3) for comments and steering me through some very tricky spots, and to [vietorfever](https://vietorfever.tumblr.com/) for holding my hand throughout the entire process while I despaired about overhauling my outline for the fifth time; and thanks, PSA fandom, for being a bright spot in a time of unending insanity ♥
> 
> I can be found screaming @undeployed on tumblr.


End file.
